Reuven Cohen, the founder of Enomaly, has been one of the brightest voices in the cloud computing revolution. Reuven, a self proclaimed Instigator, has been working tirelessly to get the word out about cloud computing. I first met Reuven on a plane ride from Austin to Chicago last year, and in that time he schooled me on everything “cloud”. I often refer to that trip as my cloud baptism. Since that trip I have stayed in touch and followed his activities. Reuven was responsible for the formation of the extremely popular Cloud Camp events. He also has started the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) to help pave the way for standards within cloud computing . Most recently he is the Instigator of something called the Cloud Computing Manifesto that will be announced this coming Monday (3/30/09).

A few of us who cover the cloud-o-sphere have been under embargo about this document and its upcoming announcement. I actually had the first opportunity to read this document last week and I had not planned on discussing it until Monday. Actually, I still do not plan on discussing the details of the document until Monday, as I promised; however, what I would like to talk about is the irresponsibility of Microsoft’s actions yesterday regarding this manifesto document. To be clear, Reuven Cohen, first and foremost is an entrepreneur and like all of us he is always looking for angles to create opportunities. Regardless, he has done some great work for the cloud computing community of which myself and software companies like Microsoft have benefited. Therefore, in an effort to coordinate this “Cloud Computing Manifesto”, he needed to share it with hundreds of organizations and numerous individuals, and all he asked the recipients were two questions in return. One, “Are you on board with this?”, and two, “Please keep it under wraps until the announcement date.”. In my opinion Microsoft was totally out of line to pre-announce the manifesto. Millions of analysts, developers, bloggers, and reporters honor Microsoft announcements all of the time and I feel it was completely hypocritical of Microsoft to jump the gun for selfish reasons, and pre-announce this document yesterday. It is obvious they have issues with the document and that is their right; however, they should have voiced their opinions about the document this coming Monday as will I.

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Bear in mind that your opinion as someone who met the inclusion criteria is likely differ from those (like myself, and [A href="http://twitter.com/timbray/status/1396134376"]Tim Bray[/A] for that matter) who were not.
The only parties who benefit more from an invite-only club than the invitees are the inviters themselves. Reuven does a lot for the cloud computing industry but concealing something like this to "make a splash" was going too far, as evidenced by the severe backlash.
Sam

Sam,
I definitely respect your opinion and your perspective. However, I tend to think it was more of a coordination effort where Reuven was trying to get as much input and awareness within in his scope of reference. IMHO, none of this would have been an issue if MS hadn't pre-released the announcement. We would have all had a great debate on Monday about this and no one would have been harmed in the process.
Thanks
John

That may be so and it's just been revealed that [A href="http://twitter.com/ruv/status/1401243685"]Reuven wasn't the mastermind[/A]. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out who is though, and it will be interesting to see if they go ahead with this on Monday (I guess they, like Reuven, are stuck between a rock and a hard place now).
It's unfortunate that this has turned into such a circus as, properly executed, this could have done a lot of good for the community. I fear that right now it's had the opposite effect, though it has certainly kicked off a colourful discussion.
Anyway as Anne from the Burton Group [A href="http://groups.google.com/group/cloudforum/msg/a2bb70ca35b1d521"]just said[/A]: "The BIG NEWS is
the hypocrisy, not the manifesto". I guess we'll see how it all pans out on Monday.
Sam

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